Happy Thanksgiving…..Be thankful for Lean

[tweetmeme source=”leanisgood” service=”ow.ly” only_single=false]Happy Thanksgiving from the Lean Is Good blog. 

As I reflect back, there is so much to be thankful for it amazes me.  Often times in our blogospheres we rant and rave about all the negative things like lack of leadership, overburdened workloads, lack of commitment, etc.  However, take a minute to think about all the things your teams did well this year!  How many kanban systems did you start or improve upon?  How many of your processes are more stable now than a year ago since you implemented standard work or process control charting?  Most importantly, how many people did you teach that there are simpler and better ways to do business successfully?

I bet you got a lot done!!!!!  Be thankful that we continue to have andon pulls to work on!!!!

Bryan

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Insanity Metrics

[tweetmeme source=”leanisgood” service=”ow.ly” only_single=false]Remember the saying “don’t put off until tomorrow that which you can do today?”  I developed a new variance of this old saying based on some recent events.  “Don’t put off until tomorrow that which you can do today, unless is clashes with a concrete head metric!”

The addition stems around the postponing of a kaizen event until a later date.  Regardless of your opinion on the success of a kaizen blitz for long term success, this particular event was important, as it centered on a QCO on the bottleneck of a sold out value stream.  It would generate immediate improvement to the business bottom line.

Hoshin Kanri – South Instead of North

[tweetmeme source=”leanisgood” service=”ow.ly” only_single=false]The other day I was out running with my dog and I experienced a troubling situation when the leash got wrapped under her belly.  I blame the dog’s ignorance and not the leash operator’s neglect!  But anyway, it was wrapped in such a way that as I tried to pull her left out of oncoming traffic, it actually pulled her head to the right, closer to the traffic.  Eventually we got the leash unwrapped and finished our run but I couldn’t stop thinking about how this situation mirrored improvement metrics from some of my past workplaces.

Roundtable 2 – How do you measure a year in someone’s life?

Staatsrat by jonas k under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike

[tweetmeme source=”leanisgood” service=”ow.ly” only_single=false]The ‘posters’ of the Lean Is Good blog have grown to four in number. Each of us brings a different background and set of experiences around Deming, lean, and learning. How could we leverage this diversity of thought and voice for the benefit of our readers? We ‘planned’ and came up with an idea that we could each briefly answer a question once a week. Today we ‘do’ it, and we will ‘check’ it after a couple weeks looking for a high rate of comments.   This is the second edition of the ’roundtable.’   It is related to this post from last week.

Hoshin Kanri and Metrics: Make it Personal

[tweetmeme source=”leanisgood” service=”ow.ly”]When discussing Policy Deployment, one of the challenges is linking the vision / Mission to daily activities across the organization. One must capture the essence of the organization as well as understand what I do impacts the overall business. It also must matter to the associates. How can this be done? You need to get creative and have the associates / team members help with the process.

Performance Appraisals – A Better Way?

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As Bruce points in a couple recent post (here and here), it is performance appraisal season.  Bruce provided many great points on how they are used for evil instead of good!  But we all aren’t as lucky as Deming and can’t just conscientiously object.  In reality most of our jobs require us to perform some type of annual evaluation.  What can you do to take the “jackassery” out of them and avoid crossing over to the dark side?

Policy Deployment #3 – Creating the Plan

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Over the last couple of weeks I have posted on policy deployment (here and here.)  In the first post we talked about the importance of a big multi-year goal.  In the second we talked about the importance of real people, those who would have to execute being involved in determining the how and the support required to achieve the big goal.  That really is …The Plan. In this post I will show a couple of ways that you might break that big multi-year goal down

Policy Deployment #2 – Command Goes Down, Control Goes Up

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Last week I posted about setting big goals for policy deployment.   Now that we have decided to “go to the moon” we need to get serious about figuring out exactly how.  Many people think that lean is a bottom up approach to business.  Think of it as being both top down and bottom up. 

Policy Deployment #1 – Smart Goals Aren’t That Smart

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We are entering the time of year when most of us will be planning next year’s activities.   Hopefully most of us are doing policy deployment or something like it and not just having numerical goals dictated to us so that we can be held accountable later.  Hopefully the goals that we work towards will lead us to new levels of performance